Two Wankel engines

The Jolly Contrarian’s Glossary The snippy guide to financial services lingo.™ Go Premium The unique, and unscorable, Mazda RX-3 Index — Click the ᐅ to expand: Glossary Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Requests? Insults? We’d love to 📧 hear from you. Sign up for our newsletter.

The “okay so how am I meant to deal with this?” situation. Named after the Rotary Mazda RX-3 in Top Trumps — a hair-dresser supercar, I am told —that doesn’t seem to be comparable in any meaningful way in the engine category, with any other card in the pack. So who wins? Search me.

Dealer: (Triumphantly slapping down a Rover 3500 Van den Plas) Cylinders: V-EIGHT! BEAT THAT, SUCKER!!!

Second player (Patiently lays the Mazda with a cryptic smile): AHA!! TWO WANKEL ENGINES!

Everyone (after a prolonged bout of sniggering): Umm...

So now what are you supposed to do?

This dilemma comes from a time before the Internet, when boredom was a priced-in feature of every adolescent life, and not just those of office workers.

Finbarr Saunders

“Wankel” is also a super near-double entendre. The design was conceived by German engineer Felix Wankel who, being German, almost certainly, sadly, pronounced his name “Vankel”, but that has not stopped generations of British schoolboys tittering well into their fifties, if I’m honest.

See also

• The JC’s own FWMD Top Trumps game
• Top Trumps
• Rotary Mazda
• Rover 3500 Van den Plas
• Opel bloody Kadett - the Supertramp of seventies automotives.
• If military aircraft are more your thing, eight jet engines